


Never Be Alone

by OverthinkingFeathers



Category: Mass Effect, Mass Effect 3 - Fandom
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief, I chose to ignore the destruction of the Citadel and mass relays, Mild rewriting of the synthesis ending, Set after the end of ME3, With some hope at the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 20:43:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8175466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OverthinkingFeathers/pseuds/OverthinkingFeathers
Summary: After Shepard is gone, Garrus struggles with her promise that he'd never be alone.





	

Commander Shepard, the popular refrain goes, died a hero, the last and greatest casualty in the war against the Reapers.

 

Factually, Garrus knows, that’s probably not true. The last casualty bit, not the hero part. No one else could be faced with mountain sized death machines and ultimately get them to play nice. That’s Shepard through and through, and no one could deny she saved a lot of lives, even if he would have preferred a solution with more dead Reapers. Still, the green light of friendship, whatever it was, hadn’t been instantaneous; reports suggested it took 34 minutes for the change to reach Palaven alone. That was plenty of time for the Reapers to take out more people.

 

Besides, Shepard wouldn’t like the saying anyway. She’d never been too fond of the limelight, and she was even less fond of death. _People should be remembered for their deeds,_ she had told him once, eyes bloodshot from sleep deprivation or crying - it was hard to tell the difference by then, too many missions gone bad, too many people lost -, shirt stained with sweat. _Remember what they did leading up to their death, not the fact that they died._

 

He remembers exactly what she did leading up to her death. It’s burned into his memory clear as anything, like he’s suddenly a drell, and part of him wishes he could forget. She told him that he’d never be alone, and even when she was pushing him into the Normandy, broken, bloody, bruised, fire exploding around them, he believed her. Shepard always came back. Someone else might not, but she always did, tired and that much closer to breaking, but alive.

 

And then she didn’t. There was no impassioned speech, no acknowledgement that this time, it’s really over, please prepare yourself for grief. Just sudden, unending static on the comms.

 

She didn’t even leave a body. The Citadel is covered in corpses, death beyond belief, and hers is not among them. It’s a cause for hope at first. Garrus can’t say it out loud, can’t give voice to the hope that maybe she’s alive, but Tali and Liara do. Hope and desire sweep through the whole crew, and they’re reinvigorated. They send search parties throughout the unfamiliar hallways, dig through rubble feverishly, set up looping messages to direct her to them. Nothing changes. Someone finds the Commander Shepard VI demo, and he weeps for days.

 

He has never felt more alone in his life.

 

So he doesn’t notice at first, or maybe he does, but he dismisses it. The wound is still too raw, too fresh. He spends too many days in a room alone, and then too many days on Palaven, throwing himself into rebuilding. Time spent too busy to think is time he can’t grieve.

 

But there’s a quarian girl who laughs like Shepard, and a geth who rolls their right shoulder the way she used to. EDI takes to always hitting x twice when typing messages, and he would think she’s just paying homage in her own way, but she seems genuinely confused when he points it out. Later, he sees a combat drone bump its owner’s elbow affectionately, like Shepard did when he was trying to make her laugh in inappropriate situations. He stares too long and too obviously, and the drone flies over, repeats the gesture on Garrus.

 

He catches a flight to Earth the next day, and he sees her everywhere there. Not just in pictures and vids - the people of her planet have fully embraced her as a hero, and her likeness is on every corner - but in the way the VIs gesture and the speech patterns of the automated announcements. They’re little things, things people wouldn’t see if they didn’t study her, but he had. It’s not her, not in the way he wanted with sand and krogan babies learning to headbutt, but it’s more than he thought he had. He doesn’t know what happened on the Citadel, doesn’t think he’ll ever understand, but somehow, some way, she left a piece.

 

She told him he’d never be alone, and he begins to think she meant it.

**Author's Note:**

> This ended up being closer to a mix of the control/synthesis ending, but I was thinking about how when Legion uploads himself to do something similar(ish), the geth you meet later shows some of his characteristics.


End file.
